Klobuchar: Kennedy’s salons held ‘delightfulness, wit’

Photos: WDCPIX

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar recalls a cryptic message from Sen. Ted Kennedy that mystified the staffer who took it: “The lantern is lit.”

Klobuchar tells the Minnesota Independent she recognized the message as Kennedy’s way of beckoning her to his tiny, memorabilia-bedecked U.S. Capitol office, where the liberal lion held a small salon of senators rapt with “wild stories” from Boston and the campaign trail.

Kennedy’s jokingly obtuse message was an example of the “delightfulness and wit” he had in surplus and which Klobuchar finds sorely lacking among politicians generally.

Klobuchar, who joined the Senate in early 2007, says Kennedy “was really welcoming to new senators” — kindly sparing them a pedantic “this is how it works” lecture about the institution.

And at some point he began inviting a small group of senators — Klobuchar, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Charles Schumer of New York and one or two others — to an office he kept in the Capitol, tucked behind a press room.

“I don’t even know why we were a group,” Klobuchar says. “We were not debating the issues of the day.”

But Klobuchar recalls with fondness Kennedy’s Irish yarns and stories of the Senate. To her they formed a kind of “gift of history,” bestowed over a series of “five, six, maybe 10″ meetings.

A rising talent on the Washington, D.C. emcee circuit herself, Klobuchar says she admired Kennedy’s ability to belt out a song for the 100 people at a birthday party she attended.

Most recently, Klobuchar said she spoke with the ailing Kennedy when he returned to the Senate for a vote last spring, visiting with him where he always sat: at the back of the chamber, where he could keep an eye on the room. They talked about how he was doing, then moved to current events.

“He loved to hear about Franken-Coleman,” she says. “Just like everybody else.”